Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 02:32:58PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: If we want to improve fsck time then the best thing to do would be to consider a different default value for the -i option of mke2fs. This advice is not applicable for ext4, since it will not read unused portions of the inode table. There have been a number of improvements in the ext4 file system format which means that in general fsck times for ext4 are around 7-12 times faster than the equivalent ext3 file system. As an aside mke2fs -t ext4 includes huge_file, dir_nlink, and extra_isize while mke4fs doesn't. This difference seems wrong to me. Urgs. +1. I've never heard of mke4fs --- who thought up that abortion? mke2fs -t ext4 and mkfs.ext4 will both do the right thing, as far as creating file systems that have the correct ext4 file system features for a file system designed to be mounted using the ext4 file system driver in modern Linux kernels. - Ted -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Russell Coker wrote: On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Goswin von Brederlow goswin-...@web.de wrote: PS: I myself like a seperate /usr but I wouldn't use it for my parents. I do want a seperate /var and /home for them though so they can't DOS the system by filling up their home. How would filling up /home DOS the system? At least a couple of years ago if you left /home with no free space, kdm (or something under the hood) would be unable to create ~/.Xauthority-* files, making it impossible to log into a graphical session. Cheers, -- Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer www.debian.org - get.debian.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Russell Coker russ...@coker.com.au writes: On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Goswin von Brederlow goswin-...@web.de wrote: PS: I myself like a seperate /usr but I wouldn't use it for my parents. I do want a seperate /var and /home for them though so they can't DOS the system by filling up their home. How would filling up /home DOS the system? Filling /home doesn't but filling /var does. And if it is all one partition ... Prior to recent changes this also affected /var/run and /var/lock and so on. With /var being full you had problems booting. The only common program I can think of which fails hard when it runs out of disk space is Squid. I expect that some DB servers also have serious problems No squid, no google or amazon anymore. Effectively (for the target audience) DOSed. but I don't think that they will be running a DB server on their home workstation. If the system runs out of space it can't spool the mail telling me the system is full. My experience with systems I run for people who aren't computer experts (which includes my parents) is that filling /home causes various parts of their desktop environment to cease working (thus effectively DOSing the system) and they also just can't save files. I have a separate partition for /home on such workstations, but this is just for ease of backups. MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Steve Langasek vor...@debian.org writes: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 07:32:35PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote: On 16.12.2011 18:38, Joey Hess wrote: Christian PERRIER wrote: I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. There isn't. There's just a broad consensus among those who are talking about changing things. Some of us think this is completely bogus and are really sick of the same already-rebutted arguments being repeated over and over on the list as if that makes them true. Then please once more for the record speak up and tell us why / and /usr must be seperate partitions? We are not talking about dropping support for having a seperate /usr here. Just about D-I not creating / and /usr as seperate partition in the make more than one partition automatic partitioning choice. It is obvious that Debian still needs to support /usr being seperate. But that isn't the issue. That is also why I don't agree with Joey. D-I is the only one that makes the choice for the user and as such is the one that can change the recepie. MfG Goswin PS: I myself like a seperate /usr but I wouldn't use it for my parents. I do want a seperate /var and /home for them though so they can't DOS the system by filling up their home. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org writes: Le samedi 17 décembre 2011 à 17:42 +0800, Thomas Goirand a écrit : I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that, and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is, the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway. True. But the fact that you are in minority doesnât necessarily mean you are right, either. Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. This is complete bullshit. With a journaled filesystem, the boot time will greatly increase with the number of filesystems to check. If no files were modified in /usr, they wonât be mentioned in the journal, and thatâs all. But having one journal to parse for all the system is definitely a measurable improvement. Also / and /usr can be read-only and definetly should be on a systems likely to have power outages like laptops. And with a read-only partition you have neither fsck nor journal replay. But even mounting an extra filesystem does cost time. If you want to save the last millisecond boot time you want / and /usr as one read-only filesystem. MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Goswin von Brederlow goswin-...@web.de wrote: PS: I myself like a seperate /usr but I wouldn't use it for my parents. I do want a seperate /var and /home for them though so they can't DOS the system by filling up their home. How would filling up /home DOS the system? The only common program I can think of which fails hard when it runs out of disk space is Squid. I expect that some DB servers also have serious problems but I don't think that they will be running a DB server on their home workstation. My experience with systems I run for people who aren't computer experts (which includes my parents) is that filling /home causes various parts of their desktop environment to cease working (thus effectively DOSing the system) and they also just can't save files. I have a separate partition for /home on such workstations, but this is just for ease of backups. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Bloghttp://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Russell Coker russ...@coker.com.au writes: On Sun, 18 Dec 2011, Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org wrote: Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. This is complete bullshit. With a journaled filesystem, the boot time will greatly increase with the number of filesystems to check. If no files were modified in /usr, they wonât be mentioned in the journal, and thatâs all. But having one journal to parse for all the system is definitely a measurable improvement. If we want to improve fsck time then the best thing to do would be to consider a different default value for the -i option of mke2fs. The current default is to have one Inode per 16K of disk space. Of the Maildir format mail servers that I run the one with the smallest disk space used per Inode has 307G and 4773821 Inodes in use for an average of 67K per Inode. A randomly selected Debian workstation with a lot of packages installed has for it's root filesystem 9.1G and 19 Inodes for an average of 49K. As it seems quite unlikely that any non-root filesystem is going to have a smaller average Inode space usage than the root filesystem (I had expected Maildir to be the pathological case of small files) it seems quite safe to make the default be -i 49152 for non-root filesystems and be -i 32768 for root filesystems. Finally using ext4 features either through mke2fs -t ext4 or mke4fs will give you better fsck performance. Are we doing ext4 by default nowadays? The feature relevant here is that the filesystem knows how many inodes have been used ever and only needs to scan those inodes. So if you only ever used the first 1 inodes out of 1000 that is a huge time saver. As an aside mke2fs -t ext4 includes huge_file, dir_nlink, and extra_isize while mke4fs doesn't. This difference seems wrong to me. Urgs. +1. MfG Goswin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Thu, 22 Dec 2011, Goswin von Brederlow goswin-...@web.de wrote: Also / and /usr can be read-only and definetly should be on a systems likely to have power outages like laptops. And with a read-only partition you have neither fsck nor journal replay. You don't have a fsck if the time/count for a fsck hasn't been met. If you have mounted a filesystem ro every time but the 6 months (or whatever time period) has elapsed then you will get a fsck. You could use tune2fs (or an equivalent for other filesystems) to make it an indefinite period. As for power outages, last time I was using a Debian/Unstable laptop I noticed that ext2/3/4 filesystems were remounted with different timeouts according to the power state. So it seems that we already have some better measures to avoid data loss in the event of power failure. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Bloghttp://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: And while we might debate the usefulness of a separate /usr back and forth, I think I can safely say that it won't become a *recommended* configuration anytime soon. :) I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that, and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is, the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway. On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: For the installer, easy represents a significant component of do the job and do it well. Sure; see below for a more detailed suggestion along these lines. However, I also don't think that should stop us from optimizing for the common case. Well, commonly, for a desktop computer, I recommend separated /usr, /var, /tmp and /home. Reasonably, if you put enough space for it (for example, 16GB for usr, 8GB for var, 1GB for tmp) then you can set the rest for /home. Today's HDD are really big, and in most cases, this setup will work very well for a desktop, and you'll be able to install a really insane amount of software without filling up /usr or /var. If you then lack space, LVM is there. Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. Only some of the partitions may have dirty bits to clean, and there's a very good chance your /usr (which holds a lot of files and is long to check) doesn't even need a check. That alone is a cool feature that justifies having a separate /usr for me. When it comes to *real* newbies (here, I'm thinking about people like my father in law or my wife who really, don't want to know what is partitionning), they wont go to hit corner cases and fill any of the partitions of their HDD anyway. For them, I see no issue wasting a bit of space on multiple hundreds of GB space that will anyway never be used. Only in the case where you have such a big disk that you can afford to waste a pile of space with mostly empty partitions. Personally [...] In most general cases nowadays, we *do* have huge disks. Just have a look into what's available in the marketplace. If you lack space in one of the default partitions, you can resize using LVM anyway. Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Le samedi 17 décembre 2011 à 17:42 +0800, Thomas Goirand a écrit : I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that, and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is, the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway. True. But the fact that you are in minority doesn’t necessarily mean you are right, either. Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. This is complete bullshit. With a journaled filesystem, the boot time will greatly increase with the number of filesystems to check. If no files were modified in /usr, they won’t be mentioned in the journal, and that’s all. But having one journal to parse for all the system is definitely a measurable improvement. -- .''`. Josselin Mouette : :' : `. `' `- signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 07:42, Thomas Goirand z...@debian.org wrote: On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: And while we might debate the usefulness of a separate /usr back and forth, I think I can safely say that it won't become a *recommended* configuration anytime soon. :) I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that, and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is, the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway. Sure but Debian Installer defaults are. End point. ... In most general cases nowadays, we *do* have huge disks. Just have a look into what's available in the marketplace. If you lack space in one of the default partitions, you can resize using LVM anyway. New users will think LVM is something to eat with bread or similar. This is mostly as if I starting to try to convince to use Awesome WM as default desktop install because I think it is more user-friendly (and it is, for my type of use, but not for general use). I do think you ought to stop to try to push your personal opinion too hard... it is clear on this thread that most people do not agree with you so lets go ahead and move topic. -- Otavio Salvador O.S. Systems E-mail: ota...@ossystems.com.br http://www.ossystems.com.br Mobile: +55 53 9981-7854 http://projetos.ossystems.com.br
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 05:42:59PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote: On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: And while we might debate the usefulness of a separate /usr back and forth, I think I can safely say that it won't become a *recommended* configuration anytime soon. :) I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that, and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is, the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway. Let me clarify: I can safely say it won't become *Debian's* recommended configuration anytime soon. It has strong enough arguments against it that while a vocal minority might manage to keep it around, I doubt it will become the default. The discussion would have to change quite drastically for that to occur. On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: For the installer, easy represents a significant component of do the job and do it well. Sure; see below for a more detailed suggestion along these lines. However, I also don't think that should stop us from optimizing for the common case. Well, commonly, for a desktop computer, I recommend separated /usr, /var, /tmp and /home. Reasonably, if you put enough space for it (for example, 16GB for usr, 8GB for var, 1GB for tmp) then you can set the rest for /home. Today's HDD are really big, and in most cases, this setup will work very well for a desktop, and you'll be able to install a really insane amount of software without filling up /usr or /var. If you then lack space, LVM is there. Brand new laptops, *today*, come with as little as 300GB drives, or 80GB SSDs. Netbooks often have even less than that. Wasting ~20GB of that seems excessive. And do you seriously expect the average user to go through the process of an LVM resize? Possible doesn't mean easy. Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. Only some of the partitions may have dirty bits to clean, and there's a very good chance your /usr (which holds a lot of files and is long to check) doesn't even need a check. That alone is a cool feature that justifies having a separate /usr for me. Modern fsck runs very fast (in large part by not checking unused bits of the filesystem). Also, unless you've mounted some of those partitions read-only, they'll all always need fsck when not cleanly shut down. When it comes to *real* newbies (here, I'm thinking about people like my father in law or my wife who really, don't want to know what is partitionning), they wont go to hit corner cases and fill any of the partitions of their HDD anyway. For them, I see no issue wasting a bit of space on multiple hundreds of GB space that will anyway never be used. On the contrary, significant overlap exists between the set of users who don't want to think about advanced concepts like partitioning and the set of users quite capable of filling a disk and installing piles of software. If you really don't want to know about partitioning, you don't want to deal with situations where you have plenty of free space but not on the partitions where you need it. Only in the case where you have such a big disk that you can afford to waste a pile of space with mostly empty partitions. Personally [...] In most general cases nowadays, we *do* have huge disks. Just have a look into what's available in the marketplace. If you lack space in one of the default partitions, you can resize using LVM anyway. See above; we don't have sufficiently huge disks to waste enough space that the non-/home partitions will never fill up, and we don't want to inflict partition resizes on most users unnecessarily. - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Sun, 18 Dec 2011, Josselin Mouette j...@debian.org wrote: Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated partitions usually makes the fsck faster. This is complete bullshit. With a journaled filesystem, the boot time will greatly increase with the number of filesystems to check. If no files were modified in /usr, they won’t be mentioned in the journal, and that’s all. But having one journal to parse for all the system is definitely a measurable improvement. If we want to improve fsck time then the best thing to do would be to consider a different default value for the -i option of mke2fs. The current default is to have one Inode per 16K of disk space. Of the Maildir format mail servers that I run the one with the smallest disk space used per Inode has 307G and 4773821 Inodes in use for an average of 67K per Inode. A randomly selected Debian workstation with a lot of packages installed has for it's root filesystem 9.1G and 19 Inodes for an average of 49K. As it seems quite unlikely that any non-root filesystem is going to have a smaller average Inode space usage than the root filesystem (I had expected Maildir to be the pathological case of small files) it seems quite safe to make the default be -i 49152 for non-root filesystems and be -i 32768 for root filesystems. Finally using ext4 features either through mke2fs -t ext4 or mke4fs will give you better fsck performance. Are we doing ext4 by default nowadays? As an aside mke2fs -t ext4 includes huge_file, dir_nlink, and extra_isize while mke4fs doesn't. This difference seems wrong to me. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Bloghttp://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 07:34:16AM +0100, Christian PERRIER wrote: (reducing CC as I guess that most are subscribed to -devel) Quoting Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org): I don't think these things are alike. Separating /var and /tmp from the rest of the file systems is done because those partitions contain varying amounts of data and often fill if something goes wrong, but can fill without impacting the rest of the system and allowing easy recovery if they're not on the same partition as everything else. Separating /var continues to be good and recommended practice if you're running anything that's likely to produce a lot of output, IMO. (/tmp should probalby just be tmpfs, but that's another discussion.) I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) So, would it be OK for participants in this discussion is we, in the installer, just drop separate /usr but keep the atomic recipe (which is not the default choice, by the way)? Dropping /usr is a good idea, I think, and continuing to keep /var separate would also be sensible. Regarding /tmp, we're now defaulting to a tmpfs for new installs, so I'm not certain if having a separate /tmp by default is a good idea or not. I would certainly like for /tmp in particular (and tmpfses in general) to become configurable through the partitioner, which would then also check that sufficient swap is also allocated at the same time. Once we have /etc/fstab.d fully supported by mount (with the next util-linux release, probably in early January), I will be looking at making all the initscripts mountpoints currently hardcoded in the init scripts like mountkernfs etc. into conffiles in fstab.d. It would then be possible for the installer to edit these files quite simply to change the defaults, perhaps using the partitioner as a frontend. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `-GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: In all of the recent discussions about separate /usr partitions, most people seem to acknowledge them as unusual, special-purpose configurations, even those who use them. I do *not* agree that there's such a consensus. On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Meanwhile, we don't want to steer any new users towards a setup with a pile of different partitions, which makes their system more complex with more potential failure modes. I hope that we are still the universal operating system, and that we don't want to force anyone to do anything. If I want to use many partitions, this is *my* call, and not everyone's business. Please don't try to force your view on partitioning to anyone. In the most recent thread, I noticed that someone mentioned they primarily chose a setup with a separate /usr partition because the installer offered such a setup as one of the standard guided partitioning options. Please consider removing the option in the guided partitioner for separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; that would leave only the All files in one partition and Separate /home partition setups, both of which potentially make sense for users of the guided partitioner. Please don't remove the above option, I like it, and I don't see why it needs to be removed just because you Josh (and maybe others) don't like/use it. You feel like a separate partition for /home is useful. Good for you, and your desktop. But when it comes to servers, the /home separate partition is useless, and having a separate /var makes things faster. Also, having a separate /tmp avoids that the rootfs gets full, and I consider it quite important especially on servers. I would recommend using it for absolutely *every* setup (desktop or servers) as a security measure, especially considering any application can fill up the temp space. Anyone desiring a setup with more separate partitions should have no trouble using the manual partitioner to create whatever custom configuration they desire. And we have even less trouble using the automated option, also it's a way faster than doing it manually. Please don't remove it. Again, the way *I* and *others* use my/their computers is their choice. Please do not remove this choice from me/them. Thomas Goirand (zigo) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Christian PERRIER wrote: I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On 16.12.2011 18:38, Joey Hess wrote: Christian PERRIER wrote: I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. If that means dropping the multi-partition option altogether or just removing /usr from the atomic partman-auto recipe is something I'd leave up to the d-i team to decide. Personally I'd be fine with either solution. Michael -- Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the universe are pointed away from Earth? signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 07:32:35PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote: On 16.12.2011 18:38, Joey Hess wrote: Christian PERRIER wrote: I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. There isn't. There's just a broad consensus among those who are talking about changing things. Some of us think this is completely bogus and are really sick of the same already-rebutted arguments being repeated over and over on the list as if that makes them true. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Quoting Michael Biebl (bi...@debian.org): I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. That was my feeling too (consensus about dropping a strong support for a separate /usr by keeping it in the atomic recipe). Which is why I think we can do it now. As of now, I have seen Thomas Goirand strongly advocating *for* the *possibility* of a separate /usrwhich will still be possible (just less convenient if we drop it from the atomic recipe). After all, by dropping the separate /usr in the atomic recipe, we don't make it impossible, we make it less easy to do. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 09:11:22PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote: On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: In all of the recent discussions about separate /usr partitions, most people seem to acknowledge them as unusual, special-purpose configurations, even those who use them. I do *not* agree that there's such a consensus. Hence why I said most people (because I didn't want to imply unanimity), but there's a difference between consensus and complete lack of dissent. In any case, note that I specifically mentioned separate /usr as a special-purpose configuration, not other separate partitions. I don't want to argue here that no possible reason exists for separate /usr (that seems like another argument entirely, and a mostly orthogonal one); I simply suggested that it represents an uncommon configuration. Do you really disagree with the statement that separate /usr represents an uncommon configuration? On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Meanwhile, we don't want to steer any new users towards a setup with a pile of different partitions, which makes their system more complex with more potential failure modes. I hope that we are still the universal operating system, and that we don't want to force anyone to do anything. If I want to use many partitions, this is *my* call, and not everyone's business. Please don't try to force your view on partitioning to anyone. Nobody stops you from using as many partitions as you like. I've suggested a change to the guided partitioner, which exists to make the most common partition configurations easy, and to steer new Debian users in the direction of configurations which will work well for them and not give them too much trouble. A configuration with everything in one partition needs no extra configuration; anyone who wants such a configuration will like what the guided partitioner comes up with. A configuration with five separate partitions seems almost impossible to provide sensible proportions for that work for everyone without editing. And getting the proportions wrong means people have to deal with strange and annoying cases like /var filling up when /home has tons of room, or / filling up when /usr has tons of room. In the most recent thread, I noticed that someone mentioned they primarily chose a setup with a separate /usr partition because the installer offered such a setup as one of the standard guided partitioning options. Please consider removing the option in the guided partitioner for separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; that would leave only the All files in one partition and Separate /home partition setups, both of which potentially make sense for users of the guided partitioner. Please don't remove the above option, I like it, and I don't see why it needs to be removed just because you Josh (and maybe others) don't like/use it. That line of reasoning would never let Debian remove *anything*, ever. Sometimes it makes sense to optimize for the common and recommended case, as long as the uncommon case remains *possible*, which it does here. (And sometimes it even makes sense to optimize for the common and recommended case by making the uncommon case impossible, but note that I didn't suggest that in this case.) You feel like a separate partition for /home is useful. Actually, I don't, but I didn't advocate that today. :) Good for you, and your desktop. But when it comes to servers, the /home separate partition is useless, and having a separate /var makes things faster. Exactly my point, then. The guided partitioning option I mentioned makes /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp all separate partitions. You just said you don't want a separate /home, and you do want a separate /var. Thus, you have custom requirements that don't fit the guided option, and you'd need to use the manual partitioner instead. I argue that the same holds true for almost anyone who might want something similar to that guided option: they don't actually want what the guided option provides. Also, having a separate /tmp avoids that the rootfs gets full, and I consider it quite important especially on servers. I would recommend using it for absolutely *every* setup (desktop or servers) as a security measure, especially considering any application can fill up the temp space. Note that newly installed Debian systems have /tmp on tmpfs by default. Also, it really doesn't matter for single-user systems, only for multi-user systems with untrusted users. Anyone desiring a setup with more separate partitions should have no trouble using the manual partitioner to create whatever custom configuration they desire. And we have even less trouble using the automated option, also it's a way faster than doing it manually. Please don't remove it. Again, the way *I* and *others* use my/their computers is their choice. Please do not remove this choice from me/them. Distributions *exist* to make choices
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Michael Biebl bi...@debian.org writes: On 16.12.2011 18:38, Joey Hess wrote: Christian PERRIER wrote: I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) I don't think that d-i should be on the leading edge of this discussion. Once Debian has made up its mind, d-i can be updated to follow the consensus. To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. There's a bit of disagreement over the deprecation part still, but I think there's a pretty good consensus that people with a separate /usr from / are doing so for fairly edge-case situations, such as wanting a partially encrypted file system, and hence are not the target audience for the pre-constructed partitioning choices in d-i. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Steve Langasek wrote: There isn't. There's just a broad consensus among those who are talking about changing things. Yes. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Josh Triplett wrote: Exactly my point, then. The guided partitioning option I mentioned makes /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp all separate partitions. You just said you don't want a separate /home, and you do want a separate /var. Thus, you have custom requirements that don't fit the guided option, and you'd need to use the manual partitioner instead. I argue that the same holds true for almost anyone who might want something similar to that guided option: they don't actually want what the guided option provides. That's not how d-i's partitioner works. You can select a recipe and then modify the partition scheme it generates to meet your exact needs. Keep in mind that the installer used to ask several times as many questions as it does now. Debian has managed to improve it drastically, and in doing so removed some choices that I'd bet a non-zero number of people in the universe cared about. As a net result, the installer now proves simpler and easier to deal with for everyone. And one of those question removal processes involved coming up with the current list where the user choses from some common recipes, or chooses to fully manually partition. Since we *have* to ask a question that provides that last option, providing the other options is free from a number of questions POV. -- see shy jo signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Dec 16, Josh Triplett j...@joshtriplett.org wrote: A configuration with everything in one partition needs no extra configuration; anyone who wants such a configuration will like what the guided partitioner comes up with. A configuration with five separate partitions seems almost impossible to provide sensible proportions for that work for everyone without editing. And getting the proportions wrong means people have to deal with strange and annoying cases like /var filling up when /home has tons of room, or / filling up when /usr has tons of room. +1 That line of reasoning would never let Debian remove *anything*, ever. And is one of the causes of the stagnation and lack of innovation in Debian. -- ciao, Marco signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Steve Langasek wrote: Michael Biebl wrote: To me it looks like there is broad consensus that a separate /usr partition should be considered deprecated and this option removed from the installer. There isn't. There's just a broad consensus among those who are talking about changing things. Unfortunately the ones that are the most agressive by shouting loudest and repeating the most often are sometimes the most successful. Some of us think this is completely bogus and are really sick of the same already-rebutted arguments being repeated over and over on the list as if that makes them true. Is there a way to collect objective information such that we would be able to know something with data other than with emotions? If the data showed that some wanted it one way and others wanted it the opposite way (which is of course what it would show) then how would having this data help or hinder either side? I will be one of the disenfranchised if /usr is deprecated. Bob signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Hi Josh, Seems you're as much passionate about this topic as I am! :) At this point, I don't remotely hope to convince you, but perhaps you will find some of my points valid. On 12/17/2011 02:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Hence why I said most people (because I didn't want to imply unanimity), but there's a difference between consensus and complete lack of dissent. In any case, note that I specifically mentioned separate /usr as a special-purpose configuration, not other separate partitions. I don't want to argue here that no possible reason exists for separate /usr (that seems like another argument entirely, and a mostly orthogonal one); I simply suggested that it represents an uncommon configuration. Do you really disagree with the statement that separate /usr represents an uncommon configuration? On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Meanwhile, we don't want to steer any new users towards a setup with a pile of different partitions, which makes their system more complex with more potential failure modes. I hope that we are still the universal operating system, and that we don't want to force anyone to do anything. If I want to use many partitions, this is *my* call, and not everyone's business. Please don't try to force your view on partitioning to anyone. Nobody stops you from using as many partitions as you like. I've suggested a change to the guided partitioner, which exists to make the most common partition configurations easy, and to steer new Debian users in the direction of configurations which will work well for them and not give them too much trouble. But I do not agree with your steering, just for the sake of making it more easy. We shouldn't only target most common partition configurations easy, there's isn't a one solution fits all, but really some choice depending on your needs. Showing to our users that separate /usr, /var, /tmp and /home can be a good choice is also important to me. Pushing users to do encryption would also be great. The Debian installer shouldn't only aim to be easy: it should do the job and do it well. I'd be happy if we had a partionner which could do as much as we can with right now with partman (which is: a lot!), just more efficiently. In other words: I'd like to do more complicated things faster. A configuration with everything in one partition needs no extra configuration; anyone who wants such a configuration will like what the guided partitioner comes up with. Of course, anyone who wants X will like X... What if I like Y? A configuration with five separate partitions seems almost impossible to provide sensible proportions for that work for everyone without editing. And getting the proportions wrong means people have to deal with strange and annoying cases like /var filling up when /home has tons of room, or / filling up when /usr has tons of room. Sometimes, you just don't care about partition sizes, you just want them to be there automatically (as long as there's a separate /var and /tmp...). But well anyway, that's a valid reason for giving *more* template choices and control in partman not less! :) Indeed, I'd be cool to select such layout, then just quickly just enter sizes on the LVM, without having to define types and mount points manually (which takes soo muuch time). I have tried multiple times to convince Otavio at the last Debconf11 that I believed partman should also be providing templates with RAID1 / RAID10 setups, since a lot of people are using it in the server room. I had a hard time, and I think he stand in your side for less choices, since his answer was that I should make a custom ISO for myself (which doesn't satisfy me, really). Please consider removing the option in the guided partitioner for separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; that would leave only the All files in one partition and Separate /home partition setups, both of which potentially make sense for users of the guided partitioner. Please don't remove the above option, I like it, and I don't see why it needs to be removed just because you Josh (and maybe others) don't like/use it. That line of reasoning would never let Debian remove *anything*, ever. We have debconf priority and the expert install mode for a reason. If you said you want to remove some templates from the non-expert installer, then I'd say it's a good idea. But not for the expert mode. You feel like a separate partition for /home is useful. Actually, I don't, but I didn't advocate that today. :) Good for you, and your desktop. But when it comes to servers, the /home separate partition is useless, and having a separate /var makes things faster. Exactly my point, then. The guided partitioning option I mentioned makes /home, /usr, /var, and /tmp all separate partitions. You just said you don't want a separate /home, and you do want a separate /var. Thus, you have custom requirements that don't fit the guided option, and
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 04:13:50AM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote: Seems you're as much passionate about this topic as I am! :) At this point, I don't remotely hope to convince you, but perhaps you will find some of my points valid. Likewise. :) On 12/17/2011 02:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Hence why I said most people (because I didn't want to imply unanimity), but there's a difference between consensus and complete lack of dissent. In any case, note that I specifically mentioned separate /usr as a special-purpose configuration, not other separate partitions. I don't want to argue here that no possible reason exists for separate /usr (that seems like another argument entirely, and a mostly orthogonal one); I simply suggested that it represents an uncommon configuration. Do you really disagree with the statement that separate /usr represents an uncommon configuration? On 12/16/2011 04:46 AM, Josh Triplett wrote: Meanwhile, we don't want to steer any new users towards a setup with a pile of different partitions, which makes their system more complex with more potential failure modes. I hope that we are still the universal operating system, and that we don't want to force anyone to do anything. If I want to use many partitions, this is *my* call, and not everyone's business. Please don't try to force your view on partitioning to anyone. Nobody stops you from using as many partitions as you like. I've suggested a change to the guided partitioner, which exists to make the most common partition configurations easy, and to steer new Debian users in the direction of configurations which will work well for them and not give them too much trouble. But I do not agree with your steering, just for the sake of making it more easy. We shouldn't only target most common partition configurations easy, there's isn't a one solution fits all, but really some choice depending on your needs. Showing to our users that separate /usr, /var, /tmp and /home can be a good choice is also important to me. That sounds like you want the Debian installer to actively advocate for your preferred partitioning scheme, even though it doesn't represent a common configuration. The guided partitioner exists in large part to say If you don't have custom needs, we recommend this configuration. And while we might debate the usefulness of a separate /usr back and forth, I think I can safely say that it won't become a *recommended* configuration anytime soon. :) That represents the primary reason I filed this bug: to ensure that people only end up with a separate /usr if they actively want one, not because they saw the option in the installer and didn't know any better. Pushing users to do encryption would also be great. The Debian installer shouldn't only aim to be easy: it should do the job and do it well. I don't think we can push encryption any more strongly than we do, short of making it the default (and while I wish we could do that, I can see a number of good reasons why we can't, not least of which systems that need to boot unattended). For the installer, easy represents a significant component of do the job and do it well. I still remember doing installs via boot-floppies. It certainly offered quite a lot more choices. :) I'd be happy if we had a partionner which could do as much as we can with right now with partman (which is: a lot!), just more efficiently. In other words: I'd like to do more complicated things faster. Sure; see below for a more detailed suggestion along these lines. However, I also don't think that should stop us from optimizing for the common case. A configuration with everything in one partition needs no extra configuration; anyone who wants such a configuration will like what the guided partitioner comes up with. Of course, anyone who wants X will like X... What if I like Y? This point went with the next one. If you want X, you'll like the option that gives you X. If you prefer Y, it doesn't necessarily help you to have an option for Z, any more than it helps you to have an option for X. A configuration with five separate partitions seems almost impossible to provide sensible proportions for that work for everyone without editing. And getting the proportions wrong means people have to deal with strange and annoying cases like /var filling up when /home has tons of room, or / filling up when /usr has tons of room. Sometimes, you just don't care about partition sizes, you just want them to be there automatically (as long as there's a separate /var and /tmp...). Only in the case where you have such a big disk that you can afford to waste a pile of space with mostly empty partitions. Personally, when I have a 1TB disk, I'd still like to have the ability to use 99% of that for the contents of /home, and at the same time as long as I haven't done so yet I'd like to have that space available for use in / or /usr
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Package: partman-auto Severity: normal In all of the recent discussions about separate /usr partitions, most people seem to acknowledge them as unusual, special-purpose configurations, even those who use them. To the extent they have a use at all, they primarily have a use for people who have very specific reasons for wanting them, and all of those people will know how to handle partitioning. To a lesser extent, that holds true for having separate partitions for /var, /tmp, or other top-level directories. It seems likely that any such setup will have custom requirements. Meanwhile, we don't want to steer any new users towards a setup with a pile of different partitions, which makes their system more complex with more potential failure modes. In the most recent thread, I noticed that someone mentioned they primarily chose a setup with a separate /usr partition because the installer offered such a setup as one of the standard guided partitioning options. Please consider removing the option in the guided partitioner for separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; that would leave only the All files in one partition and Separate /home partition setups, both of which potentially make sense for users of the guided partitioner. Anyone desiring a setup with more separate partitions should have no trouble using the manual partitioner to create whatever custom configuration they desire. - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
On Dec 15, Josh Triplett j...@joshtriplett.org wrote: Anyone desiring a setup with more separate partitions should have no trouble using the manual partitioner to create whatever custom configuration they desire. I agree. -- ciao, Marco signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
Josh Triplett j...@joshtriplett.org writes: In all of the recent discussions about separate /usr partitions, most people seem to acknowledge them as unusual, special-purpose configurations, even those who use them. To the extent they have a use at all, they primarily have a use for people who have very specific reasons for wanting them, and all of those people will know how to handle partitioning. To a lesser extent, that holds true for having separate partitions for /var, /tmp, or other top-level directories. It seems likely that any such setup will have custom requirements. I don't think these things are alike. Separating /var and /tmp from the rest of the file systems is done because those partitions contain varying amounts of data and often fill if something goes wrong, but can fill without impacting the rest of the system and allowing easy recovery if they're not on the same partition as everything else. Separating /var continues to be good and recommended practice if you're running anything that's likely to produce a lot of output, IMO. (/tmp should probalby just be tmpfs, but that's another discussion.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning
(reducing CC as I guess that most are subscribed to -devel) Quoting Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org): I don't think these things are alike. Separating /var and /tmp from the rest of the file systems is done because those partitions contain varying amounts of data and often fill if something goes wrong, but can fill without impacting the rest of the system and allowing easy recovery if they're not on the same partition as everything else. Separating /var continues to be good and recommended practice if you're running anything that's likely to produce a lot of output, IMO. (/tmp should probalby just be tmpfs, but that's another discussion.) I'm inclined to follow this advice and would indeed propose that the atomic partman-auto recipe is kept, however without a separate /usr partition (discussions on -devel and the current practice convinced me that a separate /usr is seomthing that probably belongs to the former century..:-) So, would it be OK for participants in this discussion is we, in the installer, just drop separate /usr but keep the atomic recipe (which is not the default choice, by the way)? signature.asc Description: Digital signature
